The men formerly known as the Central Park Five before they were exonerated filed a defamation lawsuit against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Monday.
With election day two weeks away, the group accused the former U.S. president of making “false and defamatory statements” about them during last month’s presidential debate with Vice-President Kamala Harris. The group is asking for a jury trial to determine compensatory and punitive damages.
“Defendant Trump falsely stated that plaintiffs killed an individual and pled guilty to the crime. These statements are demonstrably false,” the group wrote in a federal complaint.
The men are upset because Trump essentially “defamed them in front of 67 million people, which has caused them to seek to clear their names all over again,” co-lead counsel Shanin Specter told The Associated Press in an email.
Specter had no comment when asked if there were concerns some see the lawsuit as purely political because of the group’s support for Harris. “We are seeking redress in the courts,” Specter said.
Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung decried the suit as “just another frivolous, Election Interference lawsuit, filed by desperate left-wing activists, in an attempt to distract the American people from Kamala Harris’s dangerously liberal agenda and failing campaign.”
Who are the Central Park Five?
Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise were teenagers when they were accused of the 1989 rape and beating of a white female jogger in New York City’s Central Park.
The five, who are Black and Latino, said they confessed to the crimes under duress. They later recanted, pleading not guilty in court and were later convicted after jury trials.
Their convictions were vacated in 2002 after another person confessed to the crime.
They were known as the Central Park Five, convicted decades ago for a violent crime. But in fact, it was a crime they didn’t commit. This week, the city of New York compensated them for that ordeal.
After the crime, Trump purchased a full-page ad in the New York Times, calling for the teens to be executed. The jogger case was Trump’s first foray into tough-on-crime politics that preluded his full-throated populist political persona. Since then, dog whistles and overtly racist rhetoric have been fixtures of Trump’s public life.
In the Sept. 10 debate, Trump misstated key facts of the case when Harris brought up the matter.
“They admitted, they said they pled guilty and I said, ‘Well, if they pled guilty they badly hurt a person, killed a person ultimately … and they pled guilty, then they pled not guilty,” Trump said.
He appeared to be confusing guilty pleas with confessions. Further, no victim died.
The now-Exonerated Five, including Salaam who is now a New York City councilman, have been campaigning for Harris. Some of them spoke at the Democratic National Convention in August, calling out Trump for never apologizing for the newspaper ad.
They have also joined civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton for a get-out-the-vote bus tour.
